


you take what is yours (and i'll take mine)

by Inkjade



Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies), X-Men (Movieverse), X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Post-X-Men: Days of Future Past, Pre-X-Men: Apocalypse (2016), X-Men Apocalypse, because that's how i roll, dadneto, plotty AF
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-11
Updated: 2016-09-25
Packaged: 2018-08-14 11:58:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8012941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Inkjade/pseuds/Inkjade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"In the moments before his daughter moves, he feels Henryk Gorski slip quietly off him like a coat so worn that the seams part and fall away in silence. "</p><p>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~</p><p>The short version: Everyone survives the confrontation in the woods in Poland. Erik is arrested, Magda and Nina travel to Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters to ask for help getting him out of trouble, and then things get... complicated. </p><p>(Yes, it's an awful summary, I know. Sorry.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [RageSeptember](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RageSeptember/gifts).



> This is is all RageSeptember's fault. :) (Really, I should be working on other things, but the idea was just too good and I have no self-control, what can I say.)
> 
> I don't know how long this is going to be, or how frequently I'll be able to update - I really *should* be working on the million other things on my plate - but expect plotty-plotty plot things, because I went from "oh hey an Erik/Charles/Madga fic would be fun to write" to "oh hey this would change THE WHOLE MOVIE OMG why don't I do that". 
> 
> I may manage to rein in my novel-length writing instincts and keep this under, say, 40K, but, er. Don't hold your breath. :/

Erik

In the moments before his daughter moves, he feels Henryk Gorski slip quietly off him like a coat so worn that the seams part and fall away in silence.

The shyness that kept the man silent at the factory and taciturn at the dinner tables of his coworkers is gone; the tendency to hum absently over fine handwork and end-of-day cleaning, gone too. His go-along-to-get-along approach to the impositions of collapsing Soviet rule, his utter disinterest in the events of the world happening outside of his simple life, even his love of gardening: it all falls away.

What is left behind is Erik Magnus Lehnsherr, who has worn countless names like coats until they slip from his shoulders. Who has killed, and has promised not to do so again without great need. Whose fierce and terrible love for his wife and child is equaled only by his fear for them.  

Who knew—who could never forget—that this love had stripped him of all options but running, and that one day he would have to look again into the warped mirror of his past, from which there has never been any running.

They face him like boys before a lion—men he’s eaten with, laughed with, labored beside, staring at him terror-blanched and wary but surprisingly brave. The newspaper photo is grainy, the helmet covers most of his face, he could talk himself out of it, maybe—but.  

Down to the buttons and buckles on their clothing, they’re not wearing any metal at all.

No, then.

“ _Naimen zorgun deyn mamme, zeiskeit_ ,” he whispers in Yiddish when Nina crosses to him. His daughter is trembling visibly, her eyes huge and paling to ominous blue. The edge-of-sleep question from last night’s bedtime talk is written all over her face. There is a rustling in the canopy above of wings and avian muttering: he hears Magda’s indrawn breath. His pulse batters at his breastbone. How his mother must have felt in Shaw’s lab, chanting the doomed prayer of _alles ist gut_ while he clawed at the indifferent silver; how his father must have felt pulling her away from the iron gates days before, hand cupped to catch her screams, his eyes on Erik’s full of warning and bleak comprehension. Everything coming apart at the seams, all the fragile threads that stitch a life.  

For a moment he doesn’t think he will be able to get the words out of his throat.

“It’s all right, mausi. Be strong.”  

She draws a breath. Her gaze dims down to an ordinary, human color, and the birds fall silent. Then she is past him. Magda understands what comes next. Nina won’t, and he can only hope she remembers what he taught her well enough to keep control when they bind him.

Anything, anything to keep his babies safe.

Erik shuts his eyes for a second, reaching for the only steel around, deep inside and grown brittle with this terrible, breakable love.

“ _Keynmol_ ,” he says, looking over his shoulder one last time, trying to smile for them. He’s glad that he does—Magda’s gaze is molten metal and promise, all the steel he could ever hope for. His spine unbends.

“Best make it tighter,” Erik says to his jailers as they wind the rope around his wrists.

 

* * *

 

Magda

The journey from Montreal is a bewildering confusion of languages: English, which she speaks well enough; French which she doesn’t speak at all but has learned to recognize; Arabic, in which she can only curse ungrammatically; Czech, which she pretends not to know. Others she has never heard before. No Poles, no Ukrainians, Bulgarians, or Hungarians—no fellow-sufferers of the CCCP’s weakening grip with which to commiserate. A stunningly beautiful Muslim woman with an infant at her breast huddles next to her on the floor of the truck, babbling in Serbo-Croat. Magda understands enough to know she is fleeing to distant family in the city of Philadelphia after the death of her husband, but not enough to know why she weeps, outside of the obvious reasons. The baby smells like souring milk, and seems too tired to cry.

At her side Nina clings like a burr, mute and furious. Magda can feel the press of her daughter’s gift at the edges of her self, alien flickers of fear and resentment alternating with teary exhaustion and <calm-calm>. Her brave darling learned so early to soothe herself: now she tries to do it for her mother, when she can think past her desperate yearning for her father, and the disquieting depth of her rage at the men who turned on them.

She is so much Erik’s daughter in this, all her softness covered by fire and steel. It is a terrible thing to see in a little girl.

They had a following of mice and rats and birds all the way to Dubrovnik, but Nina has had no friends since they took to the air, and her tone is slow and lonely when she tugs at Magda’s sleeve, a child’s tone.

“Będzie tam Papa?”

“Nie,” Magda says, too sharply, and has to take a breath and settle herself. “Come here, kochanie.” She gathers Nina into her lap. Against her tired skin her daughter is all elbows, but Nina comes willingly enough. “English. Speak in English, we must practice for your uncle, yes?” What a thin fiction. “Shall I brush your hair? There might be mice nesting in it.”

 _This “uncle” had better have a bathtub_ , she thinks as she liberates a bristle-brush from her suitcase and begins to untangle knots. _And vodka. And an army._

She doesn’t think of Erik. She _can’t_ think of Erik, of where he might be, what they might be doing to him now, if he can hold out, if he is even alive. She has to get their child to a safe bed among people who will protect her, who know what she is, and then she can plan…something. Boże proszę, something good.

America. Land of license and brash self-interest, land of wealth and chances. It roars underneath her and all around her outside the rattling box of the truck. It shakes her bones. In all her wandering and running she has never been so far from home, or so aware of the distance she’s traveled.

 

Many long hours later, standing in the dark outside a gate that is an iron work of art and looking with speechless surprise at the—the _castle_ inside, Madga remembers her simple wish for a bathtub. She catches her hysterical bark of laughter before it can shatter the stillness. Land of license indeed.

 _< Welcome, Magda>_ she hears/doesn’t hear, and drogi Boże, he is so much stronger and stranger than she’d ever imagined, a minor god in mortal flesh. This man could wind her like a toy. His presence is a silent thunder in her mind.

But gentle, so gentle. Erik had promised as much, and Erik has faith in no one.

She braces her sleeping child against her hip, steps forward as the gate swings open to admit them.

 

* * *

 

Charles 

Charles wakes to an unfamiliar presence—presences?—tickling the edge of his awareness and his face pressed against the hard surface of his desk, where he apparently dropped off over a pile of papers needing grading. _I relly wanted too like this book but unfortanatley it is boring_ , the loopy handwriting just in front of his eyes tells him. He sighs. No wonder his brain decided to take a nap.

 _< Someone at the gate>_ he sends to Hank, startling him out of the hyperfocus of his labwork.

He retreats hungry, since Hank skipped dinner to work on a new process for coding gene sequences, and he is chased back behind his shields by Hank’s flicker of <acknowledgment-irritation-excitement-thankyou> and vague worry that the perimeter security cameras have malfunctioned. They haven’t: the woman hasn’t yet come within their range. She is on foot, sore and tired in a way that drags at his own body for a moment as he dips into the stream of her thoughts; tired, but so focused. Close to the end of her strength and unaware of that fact. He sinks under the wave of her carefully controlled desperation, surfaces before he goes any deeper, then touches the mind beside her.

The child in her arms is a mutant, a sleeping mind unusually bright through a fog of unhappy dreaming.

The girl draws him in, a strong gift with some discipline, surprising for her age—she floods him with unconscious images of <a house with a garden, men in the woods that are no longer friendly, the cool wet nose of a deer pressing against her palm, a rope and a bow in the hands of the men, unsafe, unsafe, a panic-sense of threat, Papa, _Papa_ —>

“Oh my _god_ ,” Charles blurts.

“Professor?”

Jean.

He retreats, blinks the room into place. “It’s all right, Jean,” he says, before he even meets her eyes…certainly well before he has any idea whether it is all right. _< Welcome, Magda>_ he tells the woman, who has arrived at the gate and is currently thinking something slightly unflattering about American excess.

“It’s not, Professor. They’re…it’s something bad, someone’s coming, and he was taken from them, they need help.” Jean hugs her middle, red hair wisping out in sleep-tangles, her pajama top askew on one shoulder. She has grown so much, into a wise young woman with a power like concentrated sunlight, beautiful and deadly. Charles blinks again. “ _He_ needs help,” Jean elaborates, though her thoughts on the matter are confused: _he_ is Papa, a lean, scruffy, smiling man in rolled-up shirtsleeves and  <love-love-safety>; _he_ is also  <rage-agony-betrayal, bright-burning intellect and determination that swallows sense>.

Charles draws a breath and folds himself behind his shields, understanding that Jean got the second impression from him.

“Magneto,” Jean says, unsure he took her meaning. She’s not so grown-up that that name doesn’t make her flinch.

“What else can you see?” Charles says gently. Young Jean’s power is still unfolding inside her, and thus far it seems to have no real limits. It’s entirely possible she’s gleaned more than him, and from farther afield. “Do you know anything else, Jean?”

 _< Someone’s coming>_ she repeats, freighting in that statement all the vague, flame-cast foreboding of the dream that woke her, which—isn’t much to go on, and appears to have little to do with Erik Lehnsherr or the family (good god, really?) that he seems to have misplaced. Or which has misplaced him.

The family now at his front door.

“Go back to bed, my dear,” Charles says. “We’ll talk tomorrow about this. Tonight I’ve a very tired, frightened woman and little girl to settle, and I suspect I’ll be at it for a while. I may need your help tomorrow, so get some rest.”

They are waiting in the foyer when he gets there. Hank hovers around them in human form, his safety goggles pushed up to create a wild thicket of brown hair. The mind behind all that focus belongs to a slender, dark-haired woman with a set jaw who eyes Hank with obvious misgiving. The little girl she carries sleeps with loose-limbed abandon, but even unconscious, her face is tight with misery. Her gift shivers through him—psychic, but not telepathy, something quieter. She takes after her mother in many ways, but her build, the shape of her chin, that proud nose, the jawline—Christ. Her heredity is plain to anyone who knows what to look for.

She is Erik Lehnsherr’s daughter.

He wonders distractedly if she inherited that arresting shade of gray-green-blue iris, and wants to smack himself in the head.

Charles crosses the floor to put himself at the height disadvantage he’s still not really grown used to. Up close, he can see the dirt and sweat of a long journey. “Welcome. You’re safe here. You must be exhausted. Please, sit. Would you like anything? Tea, water, food?”

Probably it would have been smarter to begin by asking if she speaks English. _Idiot._

“Vodka,” the woman says, instead of the pleas for help and demands for an explanation of his telepathic greeting that most late-night, desperate arrivals to the school begin with. Her low voice is husky with strain, her accent something Slavic, likely Polish. “A bath. And my husband.”

And this is Erik’s wife. It’s somehow less surprising, now that she’s spoken.

For a moment Charles stares, rendered temporarily mute by her directness. “Hank,” he says faintly.

“On it.”

Luckily Hank has yet to realize who the husband in question is. He’s not looking forward to that discussion.

“The first two we can manage tonight, no trouble,” Charles says, wheeling himself close as she sinks into the sofa. Her eyes shut briefly, as though it’s been a long time since she was off her feet. “The third... I will need you to tell me everything you can. And then you have my word that I will do everything _I_ can.”

“Will you?” Her gaze is piercing. She releases him from it to set the sleeping girl gently on the cushions beside her, and Charles let out a breath he didn’t realize he was holding. “I am sorry for the bluntness, but I don’t think that you and Erik parted on good terms. _Will_ you help him?”

“I…” He is doing far too much blinking tonight. Also gaping, he appears to be gaping, just a little bit. He shuts his mouth and battles down the twinge of hurt and anger that her question has roused. “I—no, we didn’t. Twice, actually, we parted on poor terms. But before that I counted him one of my closest friends, and…”

God, he’s rambling. He is not getting into his feelings about Erik Lehnsherr two hours before midnight with a crisis on his hands, even if it’s a crisis of Erik’s own making. Certainly he’s not going to lay them at the feet of Erik’s exhausted, frightened wife.

Who seems to see them anyway. “You will help him,” Magda says quietly, reading what exactly he’s not sure.

“Yes. Yes, if I can, I will. Please, tell me what happened.”

She pulls in a shuddery breath, the first true crack in her rather remarkable composure. “We…he…I was—kurczę! Sorry, sorry. I’m very tired. It makes it hard for me to talk in English.” That gaze again. He’s better prepared this time, having experienced it once, but it still makes him freeze in the act of brushing absolutely no lint at all off his sweater. “But you can…know, yes? Fast? Without my talking?” Her gesture toward her forehead makes the meaning of that clear. And yes, it would be easier.

Also—harder.

“I can read it from your mind,” Charles says quietly. “But as I’m not completely certain what I’m looking for, I can’t promise I won’t learn things you don’t intend for me to learn, Magda.”

An impatient shake of the head; her hair slides over her shoulder. “I don’t care. Do it,” she says, so he does, as delicately and carefully as he’s ever touched another mind. He slides around the lightning flashes of her fear and sorrow, the harrowing memories of the journey here, to find <Erik rifling through drawers, naked panic and that grim look she’d begun to hope she might never see again on his face—kissing her hard when she yielded their home to his certainty he’d been found out—searching for Nina with growing fear—the woods, their neighbors, their friends carrying rope and bows and pissing-their-pants expressions and she thinks _fools, if they had any real idea they would have called in the army_ —Nina in her arms, thrumming with the gift inside her and her fear—Erik’s wretched smile and straight back as he let Jacob bind him with the rope and oh, her heart is breaking but Nina, Nina, Nina must be safe and with her own kind and the man in New York can do this, will protect her with his life, Erik was always so sure of that—>

Charles surfaces with a little gasp, thinks _my god, after all that we’ve done to one another he told her to bring his daughter here_ , and Magda’s eyes fill suddenly with tears.

 _His_ tears: he’s still in her mind, projecting like he’s in his teens again. “God, I’m sorry,” he murmurs, and wipes first at her face, then at his own, before the reality of separate-minds/separate-bodies reasserts itself. He resists the impulse to back his chair away a few feet, not trusting his hands or his thoughts. “Sorry, sorry again.”

“It’s okay,” she says, and leans backward suddenly with a sigh. Her eyes, the lashes still wet, shut. “Maybe no bath tonight. Maybe just bed. —Can you? Can you help him?”

Under her fierce insistence is the fear that Erik is already beyond help, which he shares with her; the fear that whoever came to take him off the hands of the ragtag police force will have killed him rather than risk escape and retaliation. Humanity doesn’t learn quickly, but Magneto has taught them what he can do enough times for the lesson to stick.

“I can try.” Charles _does_ roll back a foot as Hank returns with not only vodka but towels and a folded stack of clothing, presumably from the stash of assorted styles and sizes they keep on hand for just this sort of event. “I will try. I don’t yet know what we’re dealing with, but I have the resources here to look for him anywhere in the world, I assure you.”

“These are for you,” Hank says, and Madga cracks an eye open, pulls the towels and clothes into her lap, and the bottle off the tray. She utterly ignores the glasses. “Um…I can show you to the guest room whenever you’re ready, Mrs.…”

“Lehnsherr,” Madga says.

Hank drops the tray. He catches it and the glasses before they hit the floor, and sends Charles a flat look.

Magda tips the Vladivar Gold to her mouth, the slim column of her throat moving three times and her face relaxing just slightly, before extending the bottle to Charles. “I have to get her to bed now. She is very tired. You will wake me if you find something tonight, okay? Please?”

Charles accepts the bottle, tips it to his own lips. The vodka is cool going down. He hands it to Hank without looking away. “Of course. I will tell you if I find anything at all.” He doesn’t think it will be that easy, though. “Please, call me Charles. You’ll be sleeping on the same floor as me. If you need anything at all, I’m just down the hall to the left. There’ll be breakfast at seven in the morning, but don’t feel you have to come to that: I’ll see that it’s brought to your room, if you’d rather not meet the children. They can be a bit overwhelming, especially in the morning.”

Magda rubs her hands over her face, her hair. “Children?”

“This is a school.”

“Erik said that. A school for…people like Nina and Erik, yes?”

Charles smiles. It’s probably not a very reassuring expression: he’s still too off balance, something about her seems designed to keep him in that state. Possibly just the fact that Erik Lehnsherr settled down in marriage—with a human woman, wonder of wonders—and had a child. It’s so much of what he wanted for Erik twenty years ago, and didn’t dare to hope for. The man he met in the water off the coast of Miami could never have done this. It makes him wonder what else has changed.

It makes him regret not checking in with his old friend-turned-enemy, if he’s being honest with himself.

“Yes, this is a school for mutants, and we teach them to control and use their powers, among other subjects. I don’t know how long you can stay, Magda, but you are both welcome here for as long as you want, and if Nina wishes to attend classes, we would be very pleased to include her.”

The woman frowns and pushes herself upright. She’s clearly fighting the urge to fall asleep right here. But: “All of us? _All_ of us welcome?”

He hardly needs to touch her mind to know what she’s asking. “Yes, of course,” Charles says on a deep breath. “Erik too, if he wishes, when we find him. We don’t turn away any mutant in need of help.”

Though he can’t really imagine Erik _wanting_ to live here again.

“Let me take you upstairs,” Hank says gently, having recovered from the shock. “We can talk tomorrow about logistics. I can carry the girl, if you want.”

“Thank you, no, I will take her,” Magda says. She rubs her face one more time, putting of such a wave of <tired-tired-afraid> that Charles has to tighten his shields to keep from tearing up again. She picks Nina up with a tender competence that is deeply moving. Hank picks up her suitcase, sends Charles another look that suggests the two of them will be talking extensively when he comes back down, and leads the way to the stairs.

“I’ll be downstairs,” Charles tells him, though he hardly needs to.

He’s going to be up for a while.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry, guys: I planned to get this up a few days ago, but I've been buried in essay-grading and book-editing. Hopefully it's not as messy as my state of mind at the moment. :)

Erik

Even before he’s awake, Erik knows the situation has not improved.

It’s the smell: a nauseating combination of antiseptic and bleach with uglier things hidden underneath, things not easy to erase even with harsh cleaning agents. It wrenches at what he’s buried, what he had to bury to live, what he took too long to learn to shut away.

He holds still, breathes normally. Acid scrapes the back of his throat. The silence is absolute. The light burns right through his closed eyelids. _Not again_ , _no_ , he thinks, but yes, yes. Again. He’s survived twice now. As long as Madga and Nina made it out, he can find a way to endure this, too.

He is on his back on a table, cheap cloth against his skin that does nothing to insulate him from the chill. His arms are bound at biceps and wrists, legs at thighs and ankles. The table is unyielding; it feels like metal against his skin. The restraints feel like metal too, thick and unforgiving.

Except they don’t _feel_ like metal. There’s no metal anywhere around him. Nothing. There’s nothing.

The prayer comes to him out of nowhere, and with it comes the faint sound of his father murmuring the words in the dark of their hastily-rented house in Leszno, while the SS prowled outside and the streets echoed with wailing and begging, his mother clutching his hand, her palm sweat-damp and cool. _Shipue deyns aoyer, O HaShem, aun entfern mir, far ikh bin shvakh aun orem. Haltn meyn nshmh…_

He can’t finish it even in the privacy of his thoughts. He is anything but godly.

 _Charles_ , he thinks, but there’s no use. He hasn’t felt Charles in his mind in ten years. He wishes, not for the first time, that he’d tried, after the disastrous hubris that was Washington. He wishes he’d called Charles on the phone some evening in more recent years just to listen to the fog of deep sleep chased out of his voice by shock; he wishes they could have sat at his kitchen table late at night and played chess; that he could have seen his old friend’s complicated expression, somewhere between delight and horror, when Nina proudly set one of her dormouse friends in his hands. He wishes—

—He wishes, and it’s pointless.

“Isn’t it just, sugar.”

Erik’s eyes fly open to blinding, sterile light. “Emma,” he says, or tries to say: the word comes out garbled and gravelly. His tongue feels like a dried worm in his mouth. Drugs: long sedation. He’s familiar with this, too. How long, he wonders, and doesn’t flinch when a shadow looms over him.

Even to his light-blinded eyes, her cleavage is the first recognizable thing about her.

 _Some things_ , Erik thinks loudly, _never change_.

 _< Others do, Erik>_ comes the voice he was bracing for (trying to brace for). It lacks Charles’ obliterating power, but makes up for that in pure viciousness: she rakes talons over the only part of him he can’t defend, can’t shore up. He gasps as his clumsily constructed mental barriers shred like so much paper under a flood of < alles ist gut, Erik, alles ist gut—ash coating his skin and the inside of his throat, he is covered in the corpses of his people—he can feel the fillings in the teeth of bodies stacked carelessly like stones, like so much trash, and Shaw tells him ziehen sie aus, wenig Erik , geben sie mir but he can’t, he is too weak, too frightened, too useless, and so he gets the whip—>

Dying might be like this. He’s dimly aware that he’s twitching in the restraints, that the side of his face is banging against the hard metal table he can’t feel, that he’s groaning. _< Oh sugar> _she coos inside him where she can never be but is, _< other things can change completely.>_

There’s something else there, something of her beyond her words, something hidden and urgent, but he can’t grasp it. He can barely hold onto himself.

It ends and it doesn’t end, she lets him go but he’s bleeding memory all over the place, being swallowed by it, all the buried things leaping out. She’s wringing it out of him. She was always good at that. Mein Gott, Mein Gott, telepaths, the very best and worst of what their species can achieve. He drags at the air, strains against the unfeeling metal. He’s honestly not sure how he’s supposed to fight this.

“Did you miss me?” Emma asks softly, and Erik raises his head as far as he can to spit in her face.

 

* * *

 

Charles

“Any luck this time?” Hank says, and Charles looks up at him wearily. “Oh. Well. If I adjust the parameters, maybe we could increase your range? Is range the issue?”

“I don’t believe it is, Hank, no.” Quite the opposite. There’s nowhere on earth he can’t find Erik’s mind with Cerebro, but only if that mind’s not shielded. Erik doesn’t have the damned helmet—that’s still hidden safely away in one of his more remote properties—but whoever has Erik now seems to have found a means of blocking his telepathy. Either that, or Erik is dead.

He will not believe that. He won’t examine why, either: it’s too confusing, too messy, and he needs to concentrate. It’s enough that Nina needs her father; that Madga needs her husband.

“There are dead spots,” Charles says on that thought, hope smoothing away some of the stone that’s sat in his chest for the last few days. He’d counted eleven of them, areas where the flare and babble of living, thinking minds faded into unsettling silence; where even the indecipherable background hum of higher fauna was absent. Most of them had been near the poles, a few in what he thinks are uninhabitable desert or tundra—perhaps a map for the anteroom to Cerebro? He should ask Hank about that. His geography needs work. “Some of them are so remote it’s reasonable to assume they’re unpopulated, but others may be worth exploring. I’ll try again this afternoon, see if I can learn something from nearby minds.”

“You need to pace yourself, Charles,” Hank says softly. Charles notes that Hank doesn’t object to the effort itself, which is somewhat unexpected. Hank’s ability to forgive is vast, but not boundless, and Erik after DC seemed to have exhausted his own personal supply Hank’s tolerance.

By the look he’s getting, he projected some of that. He winces an apology: Cerebro always does unpredictable things to his shielding.

“Nina’s a great kid,” Hank says pointedly, all the explanation he really needs to give. Hank would never want to separate a healthy, loved child from her father, regardless of his feelings about that father.

“My apologies, Hank,” Charles says, and rubs his brow. “She is indeed.”

She is so like Erik, that little girl. He knows this both worries Magda and delights her. It makes Charles wonder, not for the first time, what Erik was like as a boy: if even before the trauma that defined his childhood he’d possessed the vast reserve of fury and focus that had pulled Charles into the warm Atlantic, in what remains one of the most impulsive actions of his life. He can sense something similar in Erik’s daughter, a store of force and clarity rare in most adults, almost unheard of in a child her age. Right now that force orbits the memory of her father being bound by his friends, their evident fear of him, her mother’s desperate instruction not to let others see her powers as they fled to New York—and under it all, the dawning suspicion that she has never been as safe as she believed herself to be. It’s a terrible realization for a seven-year-old to grapple with, one Charles himself remembers all too well.

Her father was afraid; her mother is still. Nina oscillates between fear and outrage from moment to moment, a journey so familiar it tastes like old scotch and sounds like pieces clicking gently on a chess board.

“Riding lessons,” Charles mutters. Hank blinks at the non-sequitur. “Er, sorry, thinking aloud.” But it’s a good thought, or at least he is fairly sure it is: he’s still scattered, still pulling his mind back together.

“For Nina, you mean.” The stables here are minimal, but Hank had insisted on them, one of the few times he’d truly dug his feet in on something. And he’d been right to do so: working with a large, intelligent, sensitive animal that responds to every fidget and unconscious impulse does wonders for some of their more unfocused students. With Nina’s mutation, it could be much more than a means to channel her anger and fear. “Should I talk to Bill about finding a horse for her?”

“Please do, thank you. I’ll bring it up with her mother today, see if she agrees.”

“Hnh,” Hank grunts, a strangely skeptical sound. He strides off toward his labs without another word.

And what was _that_ about, Charles wonders, but doesn’t ask.

 

He finds Magda watching a game of tag from the second-floor balcony, standing straight-backed with her hands braced on the stone wall, the blind face of the satellite framing and dwarfing her. Her dark skirt kicks restlessly at the breeze. The children shriek and scatter over the lawn: Nina’s not among them. Charles stretches until he finds her in the third floor corridor reading nook, picking at the drapes, a sullen and frightened young mind curled in on itself.

Madga doesn’t turn when he wheels up next to her, but the tight circling of her thoughts unfurls a little as she becomes aware of his presence.

“Nothing yet,” Charles says, because he resolved the night she arrived not to try to break things softly to her: this woman has no patience for gentle half-truths. “I’ll make another attempt tonight. There are things to explore in more depth, which may yield something.”

“Or they may not.”

He glances up. With the height difference her profile has a regal, statuesque cast to it. Or perhaps that’s just the clenching of her jaw, her raised chin. “Or they may not,” he agrees. “It’s much too early to lose hope.”

Her thoughts unfold a little farther, whispering against his, oddly soothing in spite of her mental state. She has such quiet strength in her, such clarity. Her mind makes him think of the Caribbean, bright and warm and clear all the way down to its depths. She knows herself very well, does Madga Lehnsherr. He blinks and pulls back, chagrinned to realize he’s inadvertently been drawn in.

“Hope,” Magda murmurs, unaware of his transgression, her accent sharpening the consonants to points. “A hard thing, hope.”

He’d feel obliged to defend the concept, but with her thoughts brushing his her meaning is clear. It’s the opposite of what most people mean when they say _hope_ to him in that tone, a fond or exasperated or cynical scorn at his apparent unwillingness to deal with reality. Magda says _hope_ and thinks of the pit that’s been trying to swallow her since she last saw Erik; of her inability to sleep; of the imperatives tearing her in two as she stands here watching children play, knowing her own child may already be half an orphan.

 _Hope_ in her mouth matches _hope_ in Charles’ mind: it is the slow, hard, hurtful exercise of the heart against apathy.  

He looks down at his hands, clenched together in his lap. “Yes,” he says, alarmed to realize he’s near tears for no bloody reason at all. Perhaps he picked up more from her mind than he realized. “Yes it is.”

She’s looking at him curiously when he feels sure enough to raise his face. The shadows under her eyes  look like bruises. “Do you have family, Charles?”

It’s a reasonable question of his motivation to find Erik, Charles supposes, though it flicks him on the raw in ways she likely couldn’t guess at. He shrugs, gestures casually at the lawn before them, the throng of students shouting and dodging one another. Sherry has retreated to a tree branch. Tamin is apparently “it” for the moment, and he’s running head-down, fists pumping furiously as he pelts toward Elise and Jing-Mei with a gravelly boy-roar. Elise vanishes at the last minute; Jing-Mei shouts laughter and leaps skyward at least ten feet. < _No powers, my dears_ > Charles tells them, and waits for the inevitable “Sorry, Professor!” from several quarters before he smiles.

“Of the found variety,” he replies. The idiom confuses Magda. “I made mine,” he adds by way of explanation.

“Ah. Yes.” Her eyes see too much. He looks away.

“I was thinking of offering riding lessons to Nina,” Charles says. The syllables trip over one another, and he winces. He _still_ hasn’t gotten his balance around this woman. It’s beginning to be a bit maddening. It probably shouldn’t be a surprise: however they met, Magda must have seen quite early beyond Erik Lehnsherr’s ever-shifting armor to the beating heart beneath, for Nina is seven, and two years would not have been nearly enough time to wear down all of Erik’s iron edges. Charles Xavier, geneticist, schoolteacher, telepath, and idealist, is hardly a complex puzzle next to that feat. “We’ve, um, we’ve a small stable, we use the lessons as a means of helping some of our students learn control—for a girl with her mutation it might be useful, and perhaps she’d find a few animal friends comforting right now, so if you permit—”

“Yes.”

That simple response only serves to underscore his prattling. He casts her a slightly irritated glance and finds her smiling at him, a crooked, wry expression, her mind lighting with gratitude and amusement at his expense. “Lovely,” he mutters. Madga huffs a quiet not-laugh so very like Erik’s it makes something in his chest clench.

“You do a good thing here, Charles,” she tells him. “Always we meant—we _always_ meant, to bring Nina to this place one day. This is not how I wish it happened, but I am so glad this school is here for her. That she won’t be…”

_Alone._

If her father doesn’t come back.

He pins his gaze to the game below, giving her what privacy he can. “We’re going to find him,” Charles says steadily. “We _are_ , Magda, I refuse to accept any other outcome.”

The hand on his left shoulder makes his eyes widen. Madga bends and presses a kiss into his hair, and for a moment amazement freezes him in place. He can feel the tangle of anguish and resolve in her fingers and, briefly, her lips; he can see himself through her eyes in a quick, gestalten flicker of sensory input, less confident and more serious than is his own image of himself. He can sense all of this, but he had no idea she was going to touch him. She telegraphs her intentions no more than her husband ever did. Erik was the first person since he was nine years old to truly surprise him; Madga is the second.

“I know,” Madga says, though it is not knowing so much as _insisting_ that she is doing at this moment, and she leaves him to find her daughter.

 

* * *

 

 

Madga

The professor has more steel in him than she expected.

She had braced herself for constant chivvying, for an argument about extraction methods, for moralizing and platitudes. But Charles Xavier (such a strange English name) offers none of these things: instead, the days pass, and he quietly acquires bruises under his eyes and a haggard deepening of the lines around them as he wears himself thin in his machine under the castle, looking for Erik.

Erik, who called him the strongest of all their kind, and also the softest; Erik, who had said so only after too much wine one night early in their marriage, in a complex tone she had never heard from him before, something tight and sorrowing and bitter with longing that had caught at her in a curious, painful way. New as they still were to one another she’d understood that this was one of the scars knitted into the fabric of her husband’s heart, and she had poured him another glass and dragged his lips down to hers. But now, living like a fat and lazy mouse in this vast home which surely sits on a mountain of money, she knows that there was much of Charles Xavier that Erik didn’t see: much, perhaps, that he didn’t _let_ himself see. This particular scar in his heart owes less to scorn than he believes.

She suspects there is a matching scar in the heart of the professor. That this, as much as his honest will to help, is what drives him back to his machine night after night.

All the long journey here she’d been prepared to deal with a man whose kindness grew from willful ignorance, like a rose with its roots dug in cowshit. The reality is much more complicated. Sitting silent next to Nina’s sleeping form in the dark, listening to her daughter’s restless dreaming, Magda thinks: _This man wears his softness the way mine wears his hardness—like a coat that could come off at any moment._

It is cause for some hope.

Nina moans and sobs in her sleep, and Madga leans her head in her hands and breathes. “Boże proszę,” she whispers. “Doprowadzić moją miłość do mnie.”

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. My Yiddish and Polish largely originate from Google, so probably not the best, sorry.
> 
> 2\. It took me a bit to decide how Charles' voice would work/be formatted, what with the telepathy and all. I went with chevrons for any type of telepathic communication, i.e. impressions and feelings, and italics in chevrons for telepathic communication of direct thought. I hope that's clear. If it's confusing, feel free to say so, and I'll try to come up with something that makes more sense.


End file.
